I am probably getting way ahead of myself here, but the previous exchange about possible eventual inclusion of node-side scription made me think. If node-side scripting was implemented, would this not make Freenet an absolutely fantastic distributed computing platform, not dissimilar to various @Home projects. The problem would occur if the nodes started getting overbooked too much. This would lead to a situation where the users may have to be given the choice to:
1) Allow what DC app can or cannot run in their node. This goes against the current nature of Freenet, and breaking the current concept is probably a very bad idea. 2) Disable ALL DC apps, to preserve CPU power for other tasks. This would be a compromise, because it gives separate control of the proposed DC system from the node, and gives the same options as for fred - you either run it or you don't. The system would also be very open to abuse, because anybody could upload some node-runnable code that just wastes CPU cycles. This means that some sort of a "peer review" vote may be required to assess popularity of a particular piece of executable code. So, if the average opinion of the nature of the research the program is helping with is high (e.g. research into cure for cancer), then that application would get a high priority, and be less affected by other competing applications. Highly unpopular code (e.g. resource wasting code) would get a rating of 0 (or negative), and not be run at all. This would still leave a separate case for client-only runnable code, because this would need to come from a separate resource pool with higher priority. Of course, this could be allocated from the same pool, but with the highest priority, and only run in the node that requested the operation. This process could be terminated when the feeding pipe breaks (i.e. browser drops the connection) or the execution ends cleanly, to prevent malicious CGIs wasting resources (much like in a normal web server, funnily enough). Of course, the idea of running heavy duty number-crunching in JavaScript (interpreted) through Java (sort of interpreted) is probably doomed to failure... I just thought I'd mention the idea. :-) _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://hawk.freenetproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech
